Great Meadow

DIRK BOGARDE

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part Two

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Author's Note

This book is for

LALLY

and to the memory of my parents

It really wasn't the sort of morning on which rotten things are supposed to happen.

All the way up from the little iron gate at the bottom of Great Meadow the larks were singing like anything. The sun was hot and the leaves on the elder and ash at the edge of the gully had just started to turn yellowy-goldish, because it was going to be September in a minute although you would hardly have known it, it was so beautiful.

The high grasses were full of crickets and grasshoppers and the field curved away up towards the sky, soft and smooth and fawn as a deer's back. Only very little clouds drifted in high above from the sea at Cuckmere and sort of got melted away by the warm breeze which came in the other way from the Weald.

We didn't really know much about the witch. We had spoken to her once, years ago, with all her cats round her. She had been quite nice and showed us a sort of shell thing with
Bombay
written on it, which is a town in India, because we had given her a bit of a help with some wood for her fire. But that was all, and she didn't put a spell on us, as far as we knew, although my sister did get the measles a bit later on and I didn't, which was jolly lucky for me. But that was the only time we'd been really close. I mean, we never spoke again or anything like that.

We sometimes used to see her hurrying along, shoulders
all hunched up in a very witchy way, and her old black felt hat pulled down right to her eyes looking exactly like half an egg, which is why we called her Eggshell, although we actually knew that her real name was Nellie Wardle. She never spoke to us, or even looked, and we didn't dare speak to her in case of something funny happening. You couldn't be sure with witches. She just went on past, wagging her head from side to side and muttering awful-sounding things to herself in her long black draggly coat which was really quite green if you saw it in the sunlight, which we didn't often because she mostly came out at dusk. With the bats. Witches do.

We never went back to the caravan on Red Barn Hill where she lived with all those cats, because it was a pretty creepy, lonely sort of place, and if you had been ‘spelled' there no one would ever have known about it.

But sometimes we saw her on Fridays when Fred the Fish drove in from Newhaven in his shiny little Morris van. We'd be able to see her quite close to, because after everyone had bought what they wanted, and Fred was clearing up his boxes and the big brass scales, she used to get a fat parcel of fish heads and skin and stuff wrapped up in newspaper which he gave her for her cats.

And that's how we knew that she was dead.

This Friday he was scraping the guts and so on into a bucket, and I was putting our herrings into the red and black shopping-bag, and I said to him, ‘Are you saving all those bits for Mrs Wardle's cats?'

‘No. No more I don't. She's gorn.' And he went on wiping his chopping-board.

My sister looked very shocked and said, ‘Gorn where?' Which would have got her a box on the ears if Lally had heard her. He just shrugged and said, ‘Gorn,' again, but he didn't know where for certain.

‘There's two places, ain't there?' he said. 'There's your Heaven and there's your Hell. Who can tell where she's skipped to?'

My sister looked quite white and said, ‘There's the other place too . . . the Purgatory place, isn't there?'

He wrung out his cloth, squeezed it quite dry and said that was
Life
. Not death. And then we knew that she was dead. Of course, we had really known as soon as he had said, ‘Gorn.' I mean we knew it wasn't to Sea-ford or Hastings or somewhere, but much worse. And further.

But dead. It seemed very final, sort of. We were quite miserable when we went across to Baker's the confectioner's to get Lally her Fry's chocolate bar and us our Sherbert Dabs. Miss Annie said, ‘Yes, pore soul, didn't: you know? Jack Diplock found her on the path with all her cats sitting round her, dead as the Dodo.' She said she reckoned she'd gorn just in time to get ready for the haunting at the end of October.

But we didn't take much notice of Miss Annie, who was nice but ‘not all there', Lally said, ever since she had carried a full pail of petrol from the pump outside the shop into the parlour to sponge out some stains from her father's best suit, in front of the open range.
There was a most terrific bang and Miss Annie and the parlour window and most of the wall and a quite big armchair blew themselves right into the middle of the market square. Which caused a terrible fuss and broke everybody's window as far away as Sloop Lane. She was in the hospital for a very long time and when she came out they said that she had a ‘dicky' heart and that her poor head was a bit addled. So we didn't take much notice of what she said really, on account of her being not quite right in the upper storey, as Lally said quite kindly. Anyway, we didn't believe about the haunting part and Hallowe'en. That was soppy.

But it was pretty sad about the witch being dead, especially on such a lovely morning. Of course, we did know about people being dead, but we actually didn't know very many who were. So that made it worse about Nellie Wardle, because we did know her, and had spoken to her even.

We clambered over the rickety iron fence behind the privy, walked down through the vegetable garden, and when we got to the lean-to, a sort of wooden creosoted shed stuck on to the side of the cottage where we kept sacks of potatoes, marrows, long tresses of onions, and all sorts of things we hadn't got room for in the kitchen, we heard Lally's voice quite loudly coming through the open window. She was singing ‘Moonlight and Roses', which was one of her two favourites. So we knew she was in a very cheerful mood, and this would make it difficult to tell her the sad news.

She got to the door just as we arrived, with a big stone gallon jar of ginger beer in her arms.

‘There you are, then. Dawdling, I'll be bound. It's almost eleven and you've been gone a fortnight.' She shut the lean-to door and we all went into the kitchen. But we hadn't said anything.

The kitchen was very cool and shady with its red brick floor and bumpy whitewashed walls. We put the shopping-bag on the table, and the little list she had written for Mr Wilde, the grocer, and the change from my pocket.

‘My word,' she said. ‘Mr and Mrs Glum we are. You haven't got into mischief, you two, have you? Speak up if you have or forever hold your peace.'

‘No. We haven't got into mischief,' I said. ‘But we've got something beastly to tell you.'

‘Oh,' she said, standing the big stone jar on the draining-board. ‘And what's that then? One of you fell into a cow pat, that it?'

‘No. It's not anything like that. But it's very sad, and perhaps you'd better sit down before we tell you.'

‘Sit down!' she said, quite crossly but looking a bit worried too. You could see that easily. ‘Why should I sit down, pray?'

‘Because you might have a turn if you get a shock.'

‘You've lost the change from my ten-shilling note?'

‘No. It's there, on the table.'

‘Well, what is it then? Come along, I haven't got all day.'

‘Well . . .' said my sister. ‘It's about the witch.'

‘What witch?'

‘Who lived up in the caravan on Red Barn Hill.'

We thought that would give her bit of an idea, saying
‘who lived'
. But it didn't.

‘I don't know any witch who lives in any caravan,' said Lally firmly.

‘Eggshell,' I said. ‘She did.'

‘Oh! Nellie Wardle.' She seemed quite relieved and started to unpack the red and black shopping-bag. ‘You got the herrings, I am hoping?'

‘Yes. And the roes.'

‘Soft ones or hard?'

‘Soft. He said you liked them better.'

‘And so I do, and so do you . . . on toast.' She set the packages on the table and went over to the dresser for a plate. ‘What's going to give me a turn, I'd like to know if you don't very much mind, about Nellie Wardle then?'

‘She's dead,' I said quickly. ‘Jack Diplock found her lying on the path with all her cats round her. Dead.'

‘That your sad news then?' She was unwrapping the herrings and slipping them on to the big Lowestoft plate.

‘Yes. Don't you think it's sad?'

She lifted the plate to her nose and had a good sniff. ‘Fresh as fresh,' she said and covered them with a clean cloth. ‘Of course it's sad. Always is when someone is deceased. Very sad. But she passed away weeks ago. That's old news to me.'

‘Weeks! Fred the Fish only said today about it.'

‘Fred the Fish doesn't live here, does he? Lives over Southease . . . and you don't see him that often.' She started unwrapping the soft roes, and put them into a small pudding basin with a saucer on top and went to the meat-safe on the wall by the sink. ‘Mrs Fluke told me when I was in
Wood's last week. It clean slipped my mind. Anyway, it was probably a happy release for the poor soul, all on her own, damp and cold up on that hill. You know what it's like in the fog up there, don't you? And she had no kith or kin . . .just herself.'

‘What's kith or kin?' said my sister, pulling up her socks, which had got all runkled from hurrying up the hill.

‘Oh. Uncles and aunts. Mothers and fathers. Relations.'

‘None?'

‘None. No one could find anyone. Beattie Fluke and Doris Pratt went to the churchyard, just for the look of things.'

‘What a dreadful thing. To have no one in the whole world when you are dead,' said my sister. ‘But I suppose she wouldn't have, would she, if she was really a witch.'

Lally had put the herring roes away in the meat-safe and was washing her hands at the sink. ‘Now, let's have no more of this silly business about witches. Nellie Wardle was a poor unhappy old woman, and that's no cause for you to poke fun at her.'

‘It's not fun,' I said. ‘It's a bit frightening really . . .'

‘Stuff and nonsense. You've been got at by the village children. I've told you and told you, they'll fill your head with all kinds of balderdash. Now get from under my feet, I've a busy morning what with young Master Bromley coming in on the six o'clock and your lunch to cook. And I hope you got the currants or no cake for tea.'

Brian Scott Bromley was a bit boring. He was one year
older than me, and his father worked with our father at
The Times
. He was half an orphan because his mother had died one day, so he went to boarding-school, and we didn't really like him very much. But he was coming to stay for a week with us before the summer finished because his father had gone off and married another lady and they had gone to somewhere in France for a holiday, and he was alone. So our mother said come and stay with us at the cottage, we would love it. But we really rather hated it. I mean people staying. You always had to do what
they
wanted, at least if Lally was about, and never what you wanted. It seemed very unfair. And Brian Scott Bromley was a bit showy-offy. And spoke in a very soppy voice, which was, Lally said, because he went to boarding-school, but she thought it was very nice and gentlemanly. We thought it was ghastly, but we had to be a bit nice because he had a secondhand mother, instead of the one he had got used to, and we had both of our parents, which was pretty lucky, except we only had one set of grandparents, which worried my sister very much indeed.